In the time before Muriel’s Wedding, the Abba Gold album, and Mamma Mia the musical, Abba was the headlining band of the “Lost ‘70s.” For most people, to admit fandom usually required prefacing the discussion with that “guilty pleasure” qualifier that I hate so much.
All the pre-release press for Abba Voyage, the just-released reunion album, talks about the foursome’s arc back toward respectability and the pop culture mainstream. The album has already entered the U.K. charts at No. 1 with an even-bigger first week than Ed Sheeran’s [Equals]. There were sales of a now-phenomenal 200,000+ to Sheeran’s 140,000.) And when you put Abba’s catalog of hits through our calculations of the Lost Factor, only one of their hits actually qualifies as “lost.”
That song, by the way, is 1980’s “The Winner Takes It All,” Abba’s last American hit. We divide the number of Billboard Top 100 year-end chart points a song got at the time (it was the #23 song on the 1981 Year-End) by the number of spins a song is receiving now at U.S. and Canadian radio. If the number is higher than 1.0, a song can be said to be “lost” in terms of not receiving airplay proportionate to the hit it was at the time. When we crunched our numbers in 2020, the LF was 3.31. We ran the numbers again this week and “The Winner Takes It All” was even higher with a Lost Factor of 7.1.
Abba has a radio history and subsequent trajectory like no other band. Any discussion quickly turns to how they weren’t as big in the U.S. as they were around the world. Only “Dancing Queen” went to No. 1 here and only “Dancing Queen” is a radio staple now. That song has a Lost Factor rating of 0.12, a sign of an enduring classic — although a song such as “We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions” has an 0.03.
In Canada, which followed the UK charts more closely in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. Abba never ceased to be superstars. In the ‘00s, they were an AC staple. In the ‘10s, they rivaled Queen for the reliability of their catalog at Classic Hits radio. (Even Boney M’s “Rasputin,” which takes you far deeper into guilty-pleasure territory, is an enduring Canadian hit.) “Dancing Queen” was Abba’s only Canadian No. 1 as well, and not every song did better on the Canadian charts, but “S.O.S.,” “Take a Chance on Me,” and “Mamma Mia” stayed on the radio in Canada. Even Abba’s resurgence never brought those songs back to big-city FM radio here.
According to BDSradio, Abba got about 775 U.S. spins last week, of which 525 were for “Dancing Queen.” A few months ago, when we used current airplay to mediate the already-forgotten skirmish between fans of Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, the former act was at about 575 spins. Simon and his “… & Garfunkel” hits had a combined 1,200 spins. Survivor, by comparison, had about 2,400 spins from “Eye of the Tiger” alone.
In Canada, Abba got about 670 spins last week — impressive when you consider that those come from a universe of about one-tenth the number of radio stations. There, by comparison, Survivor got 465 spins. “Take a Chance on Me” got about 75 plays in the U.S. last week; in Canada, it got more than 140.
(As readers have noted, our Lost Factor figures don’t include satellite radio or older-leaning smaller stations, but they do track pretty well with a song’s presence in the pop mainstream. SiriusXM is currently offering a pop-up Abba channel. You can see a monitor here.)
We used combined U.S. and Canada airplay to calculate Lost Factor, which can’t be overlooked in calculating the band’s relatively low Lost Factor ratings. Also remember that the highest Lost Factor scores are for the biggest hits that showed the greatest decline over the years. Songs such as “The Name of the Game” and “Knowing Me Knowing You” have low Lost Factors because they both finished at No. 97 for their respective years, so they don’t need to get that many spins now.
The other disclaimer is that, as is the case for a number of all-time classics, some of Abba’s best-known songs never made the year-end Top 100 in America, including “S.O.S.,” “Mamma Mia,” and “Fernando.” Only six hits did make the year-end Top 100, although that’s a feat that many acts would still envy. Here’s the Lost Factor for those Abba songs that did qualify:
- “The Winner Takes It All” (3.4 on our first examination, 7.1 last week);
- “Waterloo” (0.7)
- “Take a Chance on Me” (0.5)
- “The Name of the Game” (0.4)
- “Dancing Queen” (0.12) (high year-end, high current spins)
- “Knowing Me Knowing You” (0.04) (low year-end, low current spins)
Some fans love Voyage and feel that Abba have picked up where they left off in 1982 with songs that stand up to the classics. They hail the deliberate choice by Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson not to acknowledge today’s music. I wouldn’t have wanted a trap-pop Abba record either, but one of the great things about the band in its heyday is how they acknowledged everything from “Rock Your Baby” to Roxy Music. I would have enjoyed hearing Bjorn and Benny update Abba in the same way that, say, Dua Lipa does. That said, I’m thrilled to have Voyage, and particularly happy for the grace note that it provided both the band and the once-estranged married couples that comprised it.
When I’ve had a chance to program Abba on Classic Hits radio in the U.S., I’ve looked for the openings that might let me go a little beyond “Dancing Queen,” such as after the release of Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again. I like to think that moment exists again. After Abba Gold and the first movie, it sure seemed that there were many more Abba songs in listeners’ personal pantheon than U.S. radio could confirm, whether in 1978 or now. And these numbers demonstrate in one more way that Abba is the opposite of lost.
This story first appeared on radioinsight.com